We’re 17 Days Away! The Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders and Publishers

September 23 in San Francisco. 150 hand-picked leaders. Zero sales booths. Here’s why we built it, and how to request an invitation. Fewer than 25 seats remain.

Toaster Media

Aug 11, 2026

Request your invitation here: events.thefreetoaster.com

Hey Toaster Readers,

Today, we’re excited to share more details about the Summit we’re hosting in San Francisco on September 23, 2026.

We’ll share the venue, agenda, speakers, and registered logos.

Plus, where to learn more and how to request an invitation if this sounds up your alley (fewer than 25 seats remain).

We hope to see many of you there!

-Carlos Caro & Nick Madrid

Founders, The Free Toaster

An Upscale Alternative To The Big Hotel Conferences

Some large banks send 100+ people to Money 20/20 every year.

Run the math on that.

$3,500 per ticket: $350,000
$700 per round-trip flight: $70,000
Two hotel nights at $250: $50,000

That’s $470,000 before Ubers, dinners, $12 lattes at the Venetian, and a week of lost productivity.

And what does it buy?

A spin at the roulette wheel. Thousands of people in one building, and every attendee hoping to bump into the 5 or 10 who could actually move their business.

Sure, we’ve enjoyed Money 20/20 over the years.

But the value was always proportionate to the work we put in before showing up: scheduling the right meetings, with the right people, weeks in advance. All the curation work falls on you. Skip the prep and you fly home with a pocket full of vendor business cards and 300 unread emails.

We got tired of that.

Carlos Caro spent 10 years on both sides of this channel, first leading partnerships at Credit Karma, then at Caribou. In all that time, he never found an industry event that felt like home. Everything was too big, too broad, or too far from the thing he actually cared about: affiliate marketing for consumer lenders.

So we’re building the event we wish had existed. The anti-big-hotel-conference.

The Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders and Publishers goes live on September 23 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a stunning indoor-outdoor venue a few feet from the Bay.

The Exploratorium, on the piers by the San Francisco Bay

Here’s what makes it different.

A curated audience of affiliate marketing leaders

We’re capping attendance at 150 and vetting every single guest.

More than 85% of the room will be partnerships leaders at consumer lenders and publishers, the people who collectively steer the $4-6 billion spent in this channel every year. The other 15% must be ecosystem partners that directly add value to lenders and publishers (like credit bureaus, alternative data platforms, and operational vendors).

Every person there is either someone you already know or someone you’ve been trying to meet. One day can replace 5-10 partner visits.

Discussing a unique moment in the industry’s history

SEO is shifting, LLMs are rewriting how consumers find financial products, and the AI era stands to change how lenders and publishers do business together.

Those are the conversations that get buried at Money 20/20 and LeadsCon.

Here, they have 100% of our attention.

A format that acknowledges how busy you are

Breakfast & content sessions to open the day.

Lunch, structured networking, and afternoon content session in the second half of the day.

A happy hour with passed hors d’oeuvres by the water to close.

No sales booths, no off-topic speeches, no wandering a large casino to find the person you’re not sure will attend your coffee meetup.

We plan to discuss the following:

Plus, a networking day in Sonoma on Sept 24th

Do you struggle to find unstructured, quality time with partners?

Then Day 2 in Sonoma is for you.

For an adventurous group of 50 guests from Day 1, the conversation continues on Day 2 at Ridge Vineyards in Sonoma. Day 2 has no official programming: a private shuttle with wifi, a long lunch, a wine tasting, century-old vines, and the kind of setting where a two-hour conversation happens on its own.

You’ll be in good company.

Leaders from Experian, Engine by Gen, Prism Data, Credit Karma, LendingTree, Credible, QuinStreet and the companies below are already registered for Day 1 (and many will attend Day 2 as well).